Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Jakoba True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

museumofdave Perhaps the very best thing about this bizarre and imaginative romp is attempting to tell your friends about it after you have seen it. To explain further: about fifty years ago, Thornton Wilder wrote The Skin Of Your Teeth, his masterpiece about the Antrobus family, a group which survives in spite of all the disasters that befall them. Wilder broke theatrical conventions by having actors as pet dinosaurs, rear screen projections of strange locations, and a maid who addresses the audience directly. Similar things happen in this film, with parody, satire, sentiment and mayhem all mixed in a daft melange of sometimes zany offshoots.The essential plot is simple: the head of the Katakuri family wants to move his family into the country,and open a bed and breakfast, and find contentment. Their first customer dies. There is a volcano nearby. The son dishes out attitude and the daughter falls in love with a British Spy in a navy uniform; thats just a hint of the weird and sometimes funny tale to follow. Not consistently entertaining, not always making sense, but in retrospect, zany and sometimes thoughtful viewing.

Paul Magne Haakonsen When I bought "The Happiness of the Katakuris" from Amazon it was under the impression that it was a musical with zombies, plus it is a Takashi Miike movie, two good things combined, or so it would appear.First of all, you had to wait 76 minutes into the movie before the zombies make their appearance, and then even so, you see them for less than 5 minutes. So don't acquire this movie under the impression that it is a zombie musical, which I did. You will be sorely disappointed.I do enjoy Takashi Miike's work and have most of it on DVD, this however, I will say it not amongst his best work. Sure the movie in itself was entertaining enough, it had a perverse dark comical touch to it, which is one of Takashi Miike's trademarks. But the movie was fairly slowly moving with very little actually happening, which in my opinion weighed the movie down.Also, the DVD cover has 'the hills are alive with the sound of screaming!' boasted on the front cover. Yeah, that was false advertising of a grand scale. And on the back of the cover it boasted 'The Sound of Music meets Dawn of the Dead" ... yeah, right!The story itself was entertaining, especially since all those people tragically died at the family's guest-house, which was kind of strange and coincidental. And the family itself was quite interesting and weird at the same time. The characters in the movie were nicely portrayed and had lots of depths to them, which really worked in favor of the movie. And the make-up of the zombies was actually quite good, I enjoyed that quite a lot, even though it was less than 5 minutes of screen time.If you enjoy Asian musicals, then "The Happiness of the Katakuris" is perhaps a great choice for you, personally, I enjoyed the Korean musical "The Fox Family" a lot more than I did this movie. But hey, it is all a matter of preference.

BA_Harrison Takashi Miike is one of cinema's true mavericks, a bold auteur who flirts with disaster every time he settles into the director's chair, and yet somehow, more often than not, he still manages to pull something out of the bag to surprise and delight fans of the bizarre.Take The Happiness of the Katakuri's for example: on paper it sounds positively dreadful, a horror/comedy/musical remake of Jee-woon Kim's The Quiet Family, with random claymation sequences thrown in for good measure; once again, though, Miike's unique, off-beat approach to his work, which eschews virtually every convention of mainstream cinema, makes for a visually innovative, one-of-a-kind viewing experience.It takes less than a minute for the madness to begin, when a woman eating soup pulls a small animated imp-like creature out of her bowl, after which the film becomes progressively more bonkers—a wild ride through a world where mid-movie karaoke singalongs and dancing zombies are routine occurrences. This might not be the most coherent thing Miike has ever made, and there's a good chance viewers unaccustomed to Miike's style will be left scratching their head by the time the end credits roll, but there's definitely never a dull moment.

Graham Greene The Happiness of the Katakuris is probably Takashi Miike's strangest film (or at least, stranger than any of the others that I've seen so far; which is quite an accomplishment when you consider that some of those films include the equally bizarre delights of Gozu, Dead or Alive, Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q). Where The Happiness of the Katakuris exceeds the strangeness of those particular films is in the not so subtle blending of genres, styles and influences; making reference to and pastiche of everything from Japanese television and post-war family melodrama, to Hollywood musicals and zombie exploitation.The overall result is like a kind of giddy burst of merry, kaleidoscopic excess; as sounds, sights, colours and textures all blend amidst the barrage of stop-motion horror, live action character development and scenes of Technicolor, all-singing/all-dancing delirium! The basic plot was loosely inspired by an earlier Korean film called The Quiet Family - the first film from Kim-Ji Woon, director of A Tale of Two Sisters and A Bittersweet Life - which was more of a straight horror/comedy story about a typical nuclear family that set up a hunting lodge in the countryside, only to find that their first wave of clients are dying off one by one in mysterious circumstances. Miike transports the action to rural Japan and spins a yarn of staggering imagination; adding broader strokes of slap-stick humour, campy musical numbers and a colourful zombie pastiche.Still, don't come to this expecting a horror film or something that continues the brutality of Ichi the Killer or Agitator (two other films that Miike directed alongside this in 2001); The Happiness of the Katakuris is a comedy at its most satirical and absurd; using the frame-work of the story to look at the backgrounds of three generations of Japanese men and the women that support them, and tying it all into a subtle reference about Japanese culture, from the post war to the present. And even if you chose to ignore the more satirical angle presented in both the humour and the narrative design there's still so much left to enjoy; with the constant barrage of sight gags and colourful musical numbers erupting from the seemingly calm veneer of a "normal" family life.For me, Miike is a genius filmmaker, and The Happiness of the Katakuris is easily one of his must-see works! From the Buñuel-ian tinged opening that descends into a sequence of stop-motion animation that introduces us to both the themes and story of the film we're about to see, to the grand finalé which moves spasmodically from musical, to farce, to high tension; before eventually ending on a dual moment of tragedy and jubilation. The performances throughout are superb, with each member of the family feeling like a proper three-dimensional character that we can really relate to and believe in. It's also worth pointing out that for a director with a reputation as brutal and offencive as Miike's this is the second film he made in the year 2001 alone in which the ultimate point of the film was the importance of family and tradition (the other being the similarly brilliant and outlandish satire, Visitor Q).The Happiness of the Katakuris is masterpiece film for me; inventive, irreverent but also filled with empathy and compassion. I'd place it on the list of essential films by Takashi Miike, with some of the others being the well-known likes of Audition, Gozu and Visitor Q, but also more understated works like The Bird People in China, The Great Yokai War and Shinjuku Triad Society. A must have for anyone with an interest in original, intelligent and highly imaginative film-making!